Why Network News Still Matters

By Lynn Vavreck

Feb. 18, 2015

The saturated news media coverage of the events leading to NBC’s suspension of the anchor Brian Williams last week left many people wondering what all the fuss was about. In the age of digital, fragmented media, who watches network news, anyway?

The answer may surprise you.

Even though many people consume news on cable TV or on a laptop — or on their mobile device or via hip, satirical outlets like Comedy Central — tens of millions each night tune in to watch the networks’ evening news programs. More Americans turn to the network evening news to find out what’s happening than to any other type of news except for local news.

New digital sources of news like Facebook and Twitter show few signs of replacing traditional news outlets for those who are even moderately interested in the news. The Pew Research Center reports that a visitor who arrives directly at a digital media outlet will visit, on average, nearly 25 news pages. A visitor who arrives at the same outlet’s site via Facebook or Twitter will visit fewer than five news pages. Social media may be introducing people to headlines and news stories, but readers are not spending a lot of time (they linger less than two minutes) on the news pages they visit, they don’t visit many pages, and they don’t become routine visitors to those news pages over time.

Broadcast news remains a focal moment for many people in the evening. A professor of government and the press at Harvard University, Thomas Patterson, refers to this pattern as “having an appointment with the news,” and as strange as it sounds in an age of on-demand news updates, it is the way many people still consume information. The network news is the punctuation that ends the work day for close to 23 million people.

Of course, not everyone has an appointment with Scott Pelley or David Muir at 6:30 each evening, and those who do tend to be older. But the age gap in network news consumption is not peculiar to broadcast news. Mr. Patterson has shown, for example, that young people (teenagers and those under 30) engage less with all forms of news. But when Mr. Patterson asked young people how they became aware of prominent news stories (if they were aware), most young people answered the same way the rest of the country answered: old-fashioned television news.

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David Muir of ABC and other anchors serve the many people for whom network news is still the focal moment of the evening.CreditKarsten Moran for The New York Times

This reliance on TV by both young and old makes the median age of an evening news audience look strikingly close to the adult median age in the United States: 46. Viewers of Mr. Williams’s broadcasts averaged 52 years of age, while Mr. Pelley’s viewers and those who watch PBS are slightly older, 53, according to the Pew Research Center’s American Trends Panel Survey from March 2014.

Mr. Muir at ABC comes closer to the American median (45), as do Fox News (48), CNN (42) and MSNBC (47). By way of comparison, the median age for “The Colbert Report” when it was on the air was 33. Since these are survey data, they capture viewership for these programs across all platforms and also include time-shifted viewing.

But there is something to the belief that network news is losing its relevance. Despite the middle-aged viewers tuning in, the broadcast news audience is declining year by year.

According to analysts at Pew’s Project for Excellence in Journalism who worked with data provided by the Nielsen Corporation, “NBC Nightly News” was the most popular source of news in America in recent years. Pew estimates that in 2013 roughly 8.5 million viewers tuned in to at least a portion of the network’s evening news broadcast each night.

By comparison, cable news audiences are much smaller. The median prime-time audience for Fox News, the largest draw among the cable news providers, was just under two million viewers, according to Pew and Nielsen. Of course, the cable news outlets can provide news programming all day long, and Pew’s data reveal that people who watch any cable news watch more of it than people who watch network news alone. The data also show that most people who watch some cable news also watch a bit of network news, but the opposite is not true; watching the evening news is not as strong a predictor of watching cable news. The evening news looks like the starting place for television news watchers who branch out to other more specialized outlets.

Network audiences may be shrinking, but cable has a way to go before it catches up with broadcast news in terms of number of viewers, which is why the news about “NBC News” generated worldwide attention. Network news still rules the airwaves.